Subscribe to my Email updates

Saturday, July 25, 2015

The world’s most charismatic mathematician - John Horton Conway

Siobhan Roberts, author of Genius at Play writes, "John Horton Conway is a cross between Archimedes, Mick Jagger and
Salvador Dalí. For many years, he worried that his obsession with
playing silly games was ruining his career – until he realised that it
could lead to extraordinary discoveries."

John Conway in his office at Princeton in 1993. Photograph: Dith Pran/The New York Times/Red/Eyevine

On a late September day in 1956, John Horton Conway left home with a
trunk on his back. He was a skinny 18-year-old, with long, unkempt hair –
a sort of proto-hippie – and although he generally preferred to go
barefoot, on this occasion he wore strappy Jesus sandals. He travelled
by steam train from Liverpool to Cambridge, where he was to start life
as an undergraduate. During the five-hour journey, via Crewe with a
connection in Bletchley, something dawned on him: this was a chance to
reinvent himself.

In junior school, one of Conway’s teachers had nicknamed him “Mary”.
He was a delicate, effeminate creature. Being Mary made his life
absolute hell until he moved on to secondary school, at Liverpool’s Holt
High School for Boys. Soon after term began, the headmaster called each
boy into his office and asked what he planned to do with his life. John
said he wanted to read mathematics at Cambridge. Instead of “Mary” he
became known as “The Prof”. These nicknames confirmed Conway as a
terribly introverted adolescent, painfully aware of his own suffering.

After loitering for a time with the teenage reprobates at the back of
the classroom, Conway ultimately did well enough on the university
entrance exams to receive a minor scholarship and get his name published
in the Liverpool Daily Post. As he sat on the train to Cambridge, it
dawned on him that since none of his classmates would be joining him at
university, he would be able to transform himself into a new person: an
extrovert! He wasn’t sure it would work. He worried that his
introversion might be too entrenched, but he decided to try. He would be
boisterous and witty, he would tell funny stories at parties, he would
laugh at himself – that was key.

“Roughly speaking,” he recalled, “I was going to become the kind of person you see now. It was a free decision.”

Now 77, John Horton Conway is perhaps the world’s most lovable egomaniac. He is Archimedes, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dalí, and Richard Feynman,
all rolled into one. He is one of the greatest living mathematicians,
with a sly sense of humour, a polymath’s promiscuous curiosity, and a
compulsion to explain everything about the world to everyone in it.
According to Sir Michael Atiyah, former president of the Royal Society
and arbiter of mathematical fashion, “Conway is the most magical
mathematician in the world.”

For the last quarter century Conway has held the position of Princeton’s
John von Neumann distinguished professor in applied and computational
mathematics, now emeritus. Before that, he spent three decades at
Cambridge, where in the 1970s, he dived deep into the vast ocean of
mathematical symmetry. He discovered a 24-dimensional symmetry group
that came to bear his name, and, with his colleague Simon Norton, he
illuminated the 196,883-dimensional Monster group with a paper titled
“Monstrous Moonshine”. Conway also discovered a new class of numbers,
infinitely large and infinitesimally small, which are now known as
“surreal numbers”. Those achievements earned him a spot as a fellow of
the Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, the oldest
scientific society in the world. Conway likes to mention that when he
was elected in 1981, he signed the big book of fellows at the induction
ceremony and was pleased to see on previous pages the names Isaac
Newton, Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, and Bertrand Russell.Read more...

GENIUS AT PLAYby Siobhan Roberts (YouTube).An
inadvertently authorizied biography. GENIUS AT PLAY is the story of
number theory and game theory told through the life of legendary
mathematician John Horton Conway.Publisher: Bloomsbury USA (10 Sept. 2015).

Contact me

About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.